Lost In The Rain

We had a nature and culture outing today in Davis and Sacramento with Pica’s mom. Our plan was to go birding in the morning with a field trip starting in southeast Davis at 7:45 AM, and then split off from the trip to go to the Crocker Art Museum and then to a movie. The field trip didn’t quite go as planned. We met the folks at the start of the field trip, headed out of the shopping mall parking lot, and promptly didn’t know who to follow. We thus ended up setting a new record in getting lost during a field trip.

What we had heard was that several folks were interested in going to Slide Hill Park in Davis to look for a stray mountain chickadee. We thought that was where the group was headed, so we birded there for a little bit, with no sign of the group or the chickadee. The most interesting creature there was a small furry dog that looked like a pig. We then went our own way to the Yolo Bypass wildlife refuge.

The shorebirds and waterfowl were quite happy in the rain there. We saw 4 American bitterns there, maybe 20 common snipe, and had a good look at two lovely long-billed curlews. Then we went over the bypass to the Crocker, where there was a exhibition of paintings by the early 20th century American artist Marsden Hartley.

At the end of the day we went to see Good Night, and Good Luck, playing back in Davis. It’s an excellent movie, a focused little vignette on a episode in history I didn’t know much about. But I remembered that I had heard of Edward Murrow and Fred Friendly as a kid because we had several record albums from their Hear It Now radio series—the recording of the radio announcer describing the Hindenberg disaster stands out in my mind.